That ear drum shattering sucking sound you hear is $1.16 billion dollars going down the drain.

According to a front page story in today’s Sun-Times, as of the end of 2009, only $180 million of the $1.16 billion Morgan Stanley paid for a 75 year lease to operate Chicago’s parking meter system.

When the lease deal was originally sold to the city council in December of 2008, the plan was to use approximately $300 million of the original amount to fill a deep budget hole in the 2009 budget. Of the remainder, $320 million was designated for a “rainy day” fund and $400 million was put into a long term reserve fund.

But it seems, in just one year after the lease deal was signed, $1 billion of the sale–90% of the total–has disappeared into Mayor Daley’s black hole of a budget deficit.

In retrospect, one sees the meter lease deal as the first easily understandable indicator that Mayor Daley has completely mishandled the city’s finances. During the mayor’s tenure, he had the good fortune of a robust economy and a booming housing market. With the downturn in the economy and the collapse of the housing market, revenues to the city have essentially slowed to a standstill.

But due to the Daley administration’s poor planning, only a few thousand dollars of rainy day money had been put aside for times like this. For this reason, when William Blair & Company brought this idea to the mayor with the promise of fast cash, he jumped at it. The mayor knew he had a big budget deficit looming and this was the only solution to the problem.

This is why back in December of 2008, speed was so important. The Daley administration gave the city council less than 72 hours to ponder this complex, billion dollar sale of a valuable city asset. With so little time, none of the important questions weren’t asked or were glossed over. In the city’s desperation to plug the budget hole, the lease deal got them their needed short term fix. But it was only a temporary solution to a much larger long term problem and created a slew of other issues.

With a $700 million budget deficit looming for 2011, no one expects that remaining $180 million to be around for very long.

And the meter lease deal continues to get worse and worse for Mayor Daley.

On top of the quadrupled parking meter rates and disastrous transition of the meter system from city hand to Chicago Parking Meter’s/LAZ Parking’s control which enraged Chicago drivers, now the only thing that made the deal barely palatable–the windfall billion plus dollars, is now essentially spent in just one year.

Even without this new information, a recent Chicago Tribune poll said 80% of likely voters thought the meter lease deal was a bad idea.

With Daley’s current poll numbers lower than ever, one wonders aloud if the parking meters will become his blizzard of ‘79.

Here’s the full story from the Sun-Times, “Reserves dwindling as city faces $700M budget gap.”